Sasha Perera has been playing the trumpet since she was 11 years old. (Photo courtesy of Ableton)
Trekking from Berlin to Lafayette College for an upcoming performance, award-winning auteur Sasha Perera stresses the importance of imperfection — and the trumpet.
“The trumpet is a pure religion,” she said. “It’s a sport.”
Perera is a London-born, Berlin-based experimental electronic producer and songwriter who releases under the pseudonym of Perera Elsewhere. Despite her diverse selection of instruments — piano, guitar, Indian violin and trumpet — she values the freedom to experiment that electronic music provides.
“I call them sound UFOs,” she said. “You don’t know what they are, so I can turn my voice into something totally different.”
For Perera, the important thing isn’t perfection, but the creative process itself.
“Stuff like error and coincidence and chance is a really beautiful thing in making music,” she said. “It’s kind of that anti-perfection thesis. Everyone who you really respect musically, they’ve got hard drives of terrible music — terrible, awful music.”
After university, Perera moved to Berlin at 22 to pursue a career in music, much to the dismay of her loved ones.
“It was basically a one-way ticket to extinction, so that also made it more attractive,” she explained. “I ran away to Berlin, where there was no internet, and they couldn’t call you and say, ‘What did you do, did you get a job today?’”
Since then, Perera has released four studio albums, with her most recent, “Just Wanna Live Some,” released last October and expanding on her sound.
“There’s more trumpet on this album than any other album,” she said.
Ahead of her performance at the end of this week, Perera hosted multiple workshops and a lecture, passing down expertise to students of any skill level, with the willingness to open their ears.
Perera helped students make their own beats in a workshop on Tuesday.
“I just loved how she emphasized that you don’t have to be an instrumentalist to make music,” workshop attendee Oliver Dabiri ‘27 said. “There’s a lot of people out there who have listened to music for so long and can recognize patterns and beats without knowing it.”
Andrew Madera Pineda ‘27, who already DJs, attended the same workshop and said he gleaned a lot from it.
“I didn’t know how to use a sample before and make it into beats, and that was really fun to learn,” he said.
While this was most students’ introduction to Perera’s work, some had heard the noise from across the water.
“I’d seen her boiler room set on YouTube,” Emily Finkelshteyn ‘29 said. “It made me feel a lot better that she was talking about, you don’t have to, per se, know technology to pursue music. It’s more about if you just like music, that’s enough too.”
For those interested in Perera’s work, she’ll be taking over Buck Hall for an atmospheric DJ set on Saturday night at 8 p.m., free for Lafayette students and $33 for the public.